The disclosures herein relate generally to processing responses to a web page.
It is known to create web applications based on Java™ Servlet technology. Such a web application uses HTML to present information to a client device via an Internet browser. The HTML presented to the browser can be created explicitly from Java Servlet Pages (JSPs) by using HTML, JSTL or custom tag libraries. (Java and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks of Sun Microsystems.)
HTML is however stateless. Consequently there is no link between the HTML presented to the user and the Servlet that handles any actions requested by the user. For example, a user may be presented with an HTML form including a number of fields. A form (or other web page) includes a number of HTML tags. These tags are typically used to render the form appropriately at a receiving client. The form is hosted by a server which is in communication with the user's client device. Once the server sends the form to the client, the server no longer has any knowledge of what it has sent.
When the client user fills in a field in the form online, the data that the client user inputs to the form is sent back to the server. The user expects the server to know what to do with the returned data from the client. Because of the stateless nature of HTML, the associated action handling must be developed independently. It is up to the developer to ensure that the Servlet is capable of handling any requests that arrive from the client. This means that although a library of re-useable widgets can be provided, there is no guarantee that the actions they provide will be handled correctly (if indeed at all). Current solutions to this problem are customer written and there is no framework or standard addressing it. This means that while rendering the HTML for each tag is simple, processing the resulting action is not.